My computer occasionally becomes terribly unresponsive. Opening Process Explorer reveals that it's explorer.exe hogging 100% of the CPU. I poked around until I found the thread id which was doing it, and monitored that thread with Process Monitor. There were many actions which the thread was attempting. Some of them resulted in "SUCCESS" and others resulted in "NOT FOUND". I have attached an Excel file with the logs, but I have also attached a screenshot with the actions and matching counts grouped/highlighted.

Any idea what this could be? I've run an AV scan (Microsoft Security Essentials), and it says I'm clean.

What DLLs do you see in that thread's stack?
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SLaksDec 31 '12 at 3:49

What is the value of the InprocServer32 value on top of the spreadsheet?
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SLaksDec 31 '12 at 3:49

@SLaks: The DLL which is really chewing up the CPU is "SHLWAPI.dll"
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loneboatDec 31 '12 at 4:59

@Slaks: For your question about the "InprocServer32", which one are you asking about? The first one (in red) or the second one (in green)? Also, by "value", do you mean the value of that key in the Windows Registry? The value of the first one is "%SystemRoot%\system32\SHELL32.dll" and the second one does not appear to exist. The following is as close as I can get: "HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Classes\CLSID\" Under that, there is no entry for "{20D04...0309D}".
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loneboatDec 31 '12 at 5:00

does it happen when you use the same directories repeatedly? if so, it may be a corrupt thumbs.db file screwing your explorer.exe -
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Lorenzo Von MatterhornDec 31 '12 at 21:23

1 Answer
1

I Used to experience this problem on my XP Rig, and I couldn't seem to prevent it from happening- the problem seems like an anomalous occurrence. The only solution I was able to find for it was killing Explorer.exe through the Task Manager, and then restarting it.

Simply open up the task manager (Ctrl+Alt+Delete), navigate to the Processes tab within Task Manager, find "Explorer.EXE" under the "Image Name" list, and once you have found it, select it and then press the "End Process" button at the bottom right of the window. This will Kill explorer.

Once this is done, navigate back to the "Applications" tab in the Task Manager, press the "New Task" button, and in the dialog that comes up, type in "Explorer.EXE". This will restart Explorer and should fix the problem.